


Seven Days

by Leni



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-19
Updated: 2012-11-19
Packaged: 2017-11-19 00:36:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/567067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leni/pseuds/Leni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>post-XMM1. This is probably the strangest week in Wolverine's life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seven Days

On the first day of the strangest week of his life, he asks for her name. He decides to call her Marie, but he admits to himself that he’s curious about this Rogue she's shaping herself to be.

The next afternoon, he spots her among a group of kids. Telepathy, fire-wielding teenagers, and little girls phasing through the wall take all a step backwards when his interest is robbed by the shy smile on her face. (He’s seen plenty smiles, on more beautiful faces, but sincere joy is as strange to him as his claws were to her.)

Seeing her like that, he reconsiders: perhaps she belongs here, perhaps she’ll choose to stay. Perhaps she’ll just grow into an older version of the girl she’d once been – before she was too cold and huddled in a stranger’s car, keeping her hands to herself because the option was to grow up even quicker and more painfully. 

Perhaps he’ll call her Marie forever (and, for once, that last word doesn’t strike him with fear).

He’s kind of envious about that. He’s been Wolverine for so long; he wouldn’t know how to act solely as Logan anymore.

That night, he almost kills her. She almost kills him right back.

Two days later, he dies for her.

Not that he stays dead for long.

(But he’ll remember her hungry skin demanding everything of him, and that for once, he’d been willing to give that and more.)

He doesn’t stay at the mansion, either.

Days four and five are spent on the road, wild wind messing his hair, random bits of roadside debris slicing his unprotected face. After the unconsciousness and the slow healing that followed – too slow for him, at least, – it feels _great_ to feel the skin knit back together in seconds. The feeling is only topped by the self-congratulation on having stolen the best ride available. Cyclops owes him, after all; he’d never have lost his truck if that stuck-up would have done his job right and stopped Magneto ages ago.

He cannot believe that, in however many years they’ve known the metal freak, Xavier’s team hasn’t got a shot at him.

Softies.

If he were part of that team…. He shakes his head and tosses back half of his beer. There’s no point going there.

There was a point coming here, though, as he is soon reminded of it.

“How you doing, lovely?” the woman on his right asks, fingering the edge of her vodka shot with the back of her pinkie nail – deep purple with tiny silver stars glued in – while her other hands spells an obvious invitation an inch away from his elbow.

He hasn’t been in a bar in six days, hasn’t done the things he does best.

The woman does not smile; he does not ask for her name.

The morning of the seventh day, he wakes up to cheap perfume lingering where its owner is long gone. He stares at the ceiling, trying to work out why he hasn’t yet put his clothes on, climbed on the bike, and put another dozen miles behind him. He should at least sleep the rest of the day away; it’s not as if he’s gotten a lot of that lately, what with pushing himself forward until he’s half a country away from New York state. After the madness of earlier that week, these past few days have taken a dream-like state, as if he were on borrowed time and, somewhere, somehow, he was still responsible for a little girl with trusting big eyes; as if his hands were still pressed against that girl’s forehead, demanding that his life be taken away so that she’d live.

He doesn’t get anything taken away. _Anything_

He doesn’t get enough sleep, period.

His hand moves to play with the dog tags he always wears, and it takes a moment to remember why they’re gone.

“Get me Marie,” he barks into the phone five minutes later. He should have taken the time to take a shower and pull on his pants, not dial an unfamiliar sequence of numbers a dozen times before he finally punched in the last number and let it ring. He should not be standing next to an unmade bed, clad in nothing but a growing glare as minutes pass and the girl still doesn’t answer.

But she won’t see him, and he doesn’t care what he looks like anymore.

“Logan!"

It should jar him out of this conversation, to have his name used so familiarly by a girl hardly a tenth his age.

Instead he sits down at the edge of the bed and brings the receiver closer against his ear.

“Logan?” she repeats, hesitation in her voice.

“I’m here.”

He pictures her smile as she says a soft, relieved, greeting. That's when he realizes what's the strangest thing of all: right now, he doesn’t want to be anywhere else.

 

The End  
30/01/12


End file.
